They've all been abandoned in a four-storey-high mound of blackened ice, the remains of the tonnes of snow scooped off city streets this year. It lies on a roughly three-hectare site between Bloor St. W. and the subway tracks, east of Kipling Ave. There are about eight snow "disposal sites" like this in the city. This is one of the biggest, and it will remain in its dreary, grimy state until it melts, likely in July.

Looking at it from a distance or even close up, there's nothing to suggest that this is snow. Kick at it a little, past the top layer of asphalt grindings, which are scooped up as the hill is created, and there you see ice. But mostly what you see is the anonymous, detritus of modern life – paper cups, pop tins, cigarette butts, lighters and plastic bags.

As Toronto archaeologist Ron Williamson walks around the hill, he says the site reminds him of a glacier in retreat: Here and there are long, narrow tunnels in the ice, like the moulins in glaciers, made by pooling water.

The snow hill has become a massive midden, the domestic refuse dumps that archaeologists investigate to learn how earlier civilizations lived.

For Williamson, it brings to mind the University of Arizona archaeologist William Rathje, who headed the Garbage Project. Co-author of Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage, Rathje has made his life's work applying archaeological and anthropological theory and techniques to modern landfill. He reconstructs people's lives and larger patterns of living from specific, personal bags of garbage.

This is less personal, says Williamson, whose firm, Archaeological Services Inc., has worked on excavations at the Don Jail, the first Toronto General Hospital, and Bishop's Block, the first Georgian townhouses on Adelaide St. W.

"All this debris relates not to a family, not even to a street or a neighbourhood. It's the trash of every day life, and you could go on the street today where that was collected and find more. There's an unending supply of it."

As he climbs the pile, Williamson comes across quirky, intimate objects that make him stop and poke them out of the rubble. Among them: "The puffin mitten, because it's personal."

Will this snapshot of city life be interesting in centuries to come? Not likely. These items are different from the blue pottery and pipe bowls his team found near King St. W., which have been linked to Irish famine victims treated at the Toronto General Hospital in the mid-19th century. There's so little of those remains, he says. "That's all there is of the hospital."

"This," he says, looking around the snow dump, "we already know."

We know about the street debris, the understorey of Pepsi tins, Tim Hortons cups, McDonald's wrappers, the street rubbish swept up by snowplows.

Still, to the archaeologist, there is something familiar in this litter of daily life: The paper coffee cups are modern equivalents of pottery shards; the cigarettes, like pipe fragments; the bent, rusted kitchen knife, like tools made out of bone and stone.

The more interesting litter on the surface includes things that have been accidentally plowed up with the snow on garbage-collection days and trucked here. A striking variety of items is already visible; much more will be revealed as the mammoth pile melts: the black, buttoned lady's boot, the pink flip-flop, the Garfield the Cat toy, the Sharp video cassette recorder, the baby soother, and the flocked, velvet ottoman.

Did we mention the fire hydrant? It was likely smothered in snow and sheared off in error by a snowplow. "We wondered where that went," says Dave Brown, the affable city of Toronto employee who's the supervisor of roads and sidewalks for Etobicoke-York.

He says that 12,791 truckloads of snow were dumped at the Kipling site this winter. Each load could weigh from four to eight tonnes – depending on the density of the snow. He's watched the pile get smaller – about 2 1/2 metres lower now than last month.

And in this way it's disheartening – thinking about what's left so casually on the street, thrown from cars or dropped by pedestrians. "There's not a huge concern for the environment," says Williamson. "Look carefully. There's very little of value. Everything's broken."

Brown and a crew of city workers will clean up the mess at the end of the big melt – likely in mid-July.

In the meantime, they've been digging channels to divert the runoff away from the 22 Division police station to the east and the Bloor line subway tracks to the south. Bales of straw placed at intervals catch the silt and allow water to run through to a ditch and from there to the storm sewers. Brown comes to the site every two days or so to check on the water flow.

And where will it all end up? Like the rest of Toronto's waste, it will be sorted, and the non-hazardous garbage – including the puffin mitt, the Weston banner and the licence plate – trucked to a landfill in Michigan.

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.